I am getting genuinely weary of hearing about “reach,” “impressions,” and “algorithms.” While thousands of euros are being burned relentlessly on Google ads and SEO positioning that only annoy people, your competitors who understand “Invisible Sales” are snatching the market right out from under your nose. How? Well, they aren’t using a bigger budget; they’re using more precise neurobiology.
I watch campaigns and ads frantically trying to “buy” attention, while their customer spends all their energy trying to ignore them. The human brain has actually evolved to the point where it unconsciously filters out noise, and that marketing of yours has become exactly that, nothing more than a gray blur that the subconscious wipes away before it ever reaches the conscious mind.
Let’s take a moment to recall the campaign featuring red Nescafé mugs chained up in city centers. Remember the four digits on the padlock? We saw that no one was shouting “buy our coffee!” at the top of their lungs. On the contrary, the coffee was locked away. What was the result? People organized, deciphered codes, and ran through public squares looking for the solution to the riddle; people were actively hunting for the code just to participate.
This brings us right to the core of my “Lighthouse Methodology” (which I have been developing for over 10 years). Most brands behave like hunters. They chase after customers, cast nets of discounts, and hope to catch someone. Believe me, the problem is that no one wants to be hunted. The faster you run, the faster your customer flees.
And the exact moment you become a Lighthouse in your industry, you stop selling, and customers start navigating toward you.
The answer to the “how?” in the title of this post: Here are my three brief tips for campaign creators, that is, if you want your product to become truly exceptionally irresistible:
- Introduce an obstacle. Biologically, we do not value what is easily accessible. If your offer is served to everyone on a silver platter, its perceived quality drops. A locked mug (Nescafé, Google it) is worth more than one handed out for free on a street corner.
- Design curiosity. Our brains cannot stand unfinished tasks, so if you give the customer all the information immediately, you have killed the sale. Sometimes it is truly enough to just leave a small “open loop” that only your service can close.
- And please, stop being boring. Your “direct marketing” is often just a euphemism for a lack of vision. To put it in literary terms, be a signal in the darkness, not just another lightbulb in the row.
My question for the bravest so-called “marketing specialists”: If I cut your entire advertising budget tomorrow, would anyone notice you exist?
If the answer is “no,” your business is on life support, and you are just paying the electricity bill.
